Immigrants are turning themselves into border agents to seek political asylum. (Photo: ICE)
Of all the promises Donald Trump made during the 2024 election, the mass deportation of 10 million “illegal” immigrants is likely to be the first to quickly implode once he takes office.
The sheer logistics and cost of his promise are two of the largest hurdles, but if past practice is any indicator, the effort will be rife with graft and fall far short of its goals.
Mass deportation was Trump’s solution to a “crisis” largely ginned up by Republicans. A right-wing echo chamber amplified disinformation, ranging from migrant crime to “they’re eating the cats and dogs.”
Trump’s fear mongering registered with voters — to an extent. While support for Trump’s plan was strong, a CNN national exit poll shows public support falls short of a mandate.
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A majority of those polled, 56%, said most undocumented immigrants should be offered a chance to apply for legal status, rather than being deported.
The finding suggests that public support could rapidly go off the rails, if Trump’s deportation campaign appears heavy-handed, cruel or inhumane.
The effort is likely to be all three, judging by Trump border Czar Tom Homan’s public statements and the appointment of sadistic, anti-immigration extremist Stephen Miller, as deputy chief of staff and homeland security adviser.
Trump has walled in his administration with effusive promises, but turning mass deportation into reality will be his most challenging to fulfill in what amounts to the largest law enforcement operation in history.
Polish immigrant families worked on farms to stave off poverty in 1909. (Photo: Lewis Hine)
The makings of the looming administrative nightmare begin with president-elect’s promise to start the campaign on “day one” and return “illegal aliens back to their country of origin.”
Of course, plenty of video footage will air on Fox News and other media outlets showing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents leading handcuffed, mostly brown and black men, to waiting vans.
But beyond a public show of arrests, the incoming Trump administration is woefully unprepared to carry out anything approaching mass deportations.
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The logistics and cost, alone, are daunting. This fiscal year, Congress has only appropriated enough money for 41,500 detention beds.
A 100-fold increase would be needed to launch even small-scale mass deportation. Those facilities currently don’t exist. The administration plans to turn to private prison companies, which have been plagued by fraud and mistreatment of prisoners.
It could take up to two years — halfway through the Trump administration — to begin building facilities to make a dent in the undocumented immigrant population.
In any case, it will cost at least $315 billion to arrest, detain, process and remove an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants currently in country, according to the conservative American Immigration Council (AIC).
That figure does not include “the long-term cost of a sustained mass deporation operation, or “the incalculable additional cost” of housing immigrants until they can be deported, the council warns.
More than 98% of immigrants at the border turn themselves in so they can seek political asylum. (Photo: ICE)
Tens of thousands of agents will need to be hired to carry out one million arrests per year and ICE will have to dramatically increase its fleet of charter aircraft to fly out immigrants. In addition, Trump plans to divert thousands of active duty military, who will need to be trained in law enforcement tactics.
As the number of law enforcement agents rises, the managerial and human resources workload of the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice would increase in step.
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The “ultimate cost” would average out to $88 billion annually, or $967.9 billion over the next decade, the organization estimated, calling the expense “devastating.”
“To put the scale of detaining over 13 million undocumented immigrants into context, the entire U.S. prison and jail population in 2022, comprising every person held in local, county, state, and federal prisons and jails, was 1.9 million people,” the AIC noted.
Trump has countered by saying deportation won’t have a price tag, but other daunting hurdles exist.
Foremost, he’ll have to turn to Congress to not only get funding for his ambitious program, but also to get key changes in immigration law. While Republicans will control both House and Senate, their majorities are so thin they will have to involve Democrats in the process.
During Trump’s first term, the courts roundly rejected his effort to control the flow of immigrants over the border through executive orders alone.
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“Whatever the scope of the President’s authority, he may not rewrite the immigration laws to impose a condition that Congress has expressly forbidden,” the judge wrote in a key 2018 decision that was later upheld by the Supreme Court.
Under current law, immigrants who seek political asylum have a right to enter the country no matter how they arrive at the border, and they are guaranteed a hearing on their claims. Today, 98% of immigrants turn themselves in to border agents voluntarily and ask for asylum.
Because of the surge in immigrants and persistent under-funding of border resources by Congress, immigration hearings are typically delayed for two to four years. Immigrants must either be held in detention or released on a promise to return for their hearing.
Immigrant families face overcrowding and poor conditions in federal detention centers. (Photo: DHS IG)
Immigration courts have been swamped, according to an immigration data tracking service.
In FY 2023, the court reported nearly 1.8 million new cases, up from a previous high of 1.4 million new cases.
Courts closed more than 900,000 immigration cases this year, the most in a single fiscal year and greater by 235,000 than the number in FY 2023.
New cases continue to fall sharply under the Biden administration. In September, new court cases were less than a third of levels earlier in the year. Still, 3.7 million cases are pending in FY 2023, nearly double the 1.9 million cases in the court’s backlog at the end of FY 2022, according to the data service.
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The Trump administration at best could round up those immigrants, many of whom have jobs and families, and house them in what amounts to concentration camps at a typical cost of $44,000 per detainee annually.
Tens of thousands people would likely languish indefinitely in the camps, because the United States currently only has deportation agreements with three Latin American countries. (Mexico, Peru and Guatemala)
The government will face substantial legal challenges from public interest groups like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and immigrant advocate groups.
They would most certainly argue that mass incarceration violates the Constitutional right to due process and prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment.
“Lawsuits challenging allegations of widespread human rights violations would inevitably incur their own costs and burdens on the justice system,” the AIC reports.
More than 2.1 million undocumented immigrants are employed in food processing from farm to factory. (Photo: USDA)
To get around the legal impediments, Trump has threatened to round up immigrants under an obscure 1798 law known as the Alien Enemies Act. It was last used in 1941 to detain U.S. citizens of Japanese descent during World War II.
The Act is very narrowly drawn and only pertains to males over the age of 14 who hail from a country “at war” with the United States. Many scholars, going back to Thomas Jefferson, think the Act violates the Ninth and Tenth Amendments and would be instantly challenged in court.
To create the impression of a mass roundup, Trump’s ICE will likely go for the low-hanging fruit– the illegal immigrants already marked for deportation by the Biden administration.
But they amount to a drop in the bucket. In fiscal 2023, about 38,838 immigrants were held in federal prisons and another 24,000 were held by the U.S. Marshal Service in state, local and private jails. Two-thirds have no criminal record.
ICE agents are already authorized to conduct sweeps for illegal immigrants, mostly in the workplace, but those raids have proved to be highly unpopular, costly and disruptive to businesses.
Indeed, mass deportation would impose significant, indirect costs on the economy. Economists estimate 1 million immigrant deportations a year would reduce the economy’s output (GDP) by 4.2% to 6.8%, triggering a sharp decline in tax revenue.
“In 2022 alone, undocumented immigrant households paid $46.8 billion in federal taxes and $29.3 billion in state and local taxes. Undocumented immigrants also contributed $22.6 billion to Social Security and $5.7 billion to Medicare,” while being excluded from those programs, according to the Immigration Council.
Construction, agriculture, and hospitality sectors would be hit hardest. “As industries suffer, hundreds of thousands of U.S.-born workers could lose their jobs,” the organization warns.
The nation is already facing an acute shortage of workers. Even the ultra-conservative U.S. Chamber of Commerce has sounded the alarm. The latest data shows that 8 million job openings went unfilled last year because businesses could not find workers to hire, it reported.
Where would those new workers come from? In 2022, nearly 90% of undocumented immigrants were of working age, compared to 61.3% of the U.S.-born population.
“Losing these working-age undocumented immigrants would worsen the severe workforce challenges that many industries have already been struggling with in the past few years,” the AIC notes.
Among the deported would be 1 million undocumented immigrant entrepreneurs. They’re business owners who employ thousands and generated $27.1 billion in total business income in 2022.
Also complicating deportations are the estimated 5.1 million immigrant children, who are natural born, U.S. citizens. Trump border czar Homan says children would be separated or exit with their parents, but no legal way exists to deport them.
Mixed-status families would be plunged into poverty without one or both working parents.
Trump has boasted that he will repeal “birthright” citizenship retroactively, but the right is enshrined in the Constitution, and would require a Constitutional amendment to repeal.
Both houses of Congress and at least 38 states would have to ratify the amendment, a process that typically takes years, not to mention the public relations disaster that would ensue.
Given the huge social and economic dislocations of the scheme, Trump has begun to walk back the scope of deportations.
He recently told a business group, he would still allow immigrants into the country “legally.” Of course, they are overwhelmingly entering legally now.
It’s clear that neither Trump nor his circle of advisors have thought through his pie-in-the-sky proposal.
If he’s allowed to go through with it, the nation will suffer incalculable harm.